Location-based services for mobile phones focus on current location. These services are popular, and they include navigation, traffic, weather, coupons, travel check-in, restaurant reviews, photo sharing, local discovery (convenience store), nearest ATM, show-times, gaming, enhanced 911, people locators, and social networking. If a person's planned, routine and extemporaneous (errands) future locations can be determined, new location-based services may be optimized and personalized to solve important problems.
People enjoy maintaining status updates on social networking services like Twitter and Facebook that tell their contacts what they are doing, reading or what they are thinking about. Some status updates are tagged with latitude/longitude coordinates providing geographic position. Some social networking sites have embedded calendars that enable people to share social event details (parties, public functions, etc.) with their friends.
People use location-specific status reports to enable meeting friends or like-minded people. People can use status updates to say where they will be in the future. People can use such services to coordinate travel plans with the hope of being at the same place at the same time.
Future location, however, is very sensitive information. In some circumstances people want to privately share that location information with select people (for instance that they plan to go to the movies which is shared with close friends). In some circumstances they want to broadcast future location to as large a following as possible (a celebrity publicizing a book signing tour). Sharing future location with friends and colleagues makes it easier to meet up as friends can adjust their plans to make meeting up possible. Precisely calculating future location can also make it easier to receive relevant recommendations, coupons and other benefits allowing users to make best use of their precious time. To date, location-based applications and services have not provided solutions that adequately address future location.